Lights out, Voice on
Last summer, northern Italy’s Manifesta 7 was the most radical of them all: just voices, mostly in the dark. If we all thought that visual culture had been entirely accepted in everyone’s lives, down to our cell phones, art now chose the voice and nothing but the voice. Indeed, it is to be expected of the recalcitrant artist that he or she should turn against the flood of images, the way artists have always done. Still, this delaying motion, this attempted concentration, this extreme choice for the imaginary in preference to sight came as a surprise, at least for the average hard-of-hearing – because visually trained – audience. The question that remains is what the public is supposed to do about it, about all this spoken art. Manifesta 7 was not alone with its speaking exhibition. Voices are being heard all over the international art world. Once we had speaking about art, the discourse that pops up in all the crooks and crannies and provides art with a continuous, comforting babbling brook of words (a phenomenon to which this magazine duly contributes), followed by an almost daily portion of lectures on art. Now we have speaking as art. What was first just a murmur in the days of relational aesthetics, somewhat uncritical and undetermined, has meanwhile become speaking of the finest kind, conversation pieces in the new style. The nature of speaking is foremost, separate from any communicative value, as art never desires to be all too comprehensible. Read, for example, the introduction, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’, in the recent issue of F.R. David (winter 2008). Devoted to the word, this publication has explicitly turned against communication. It quotes Jean Baudrillard, who said, ‘Philosophy should not seek communication.’ The editors themselves (Ann Demeester, Will Holder and Dieter Roelstraete) speak of the ‘tyranny of communication’ in a world that demands of everything that it speak in an accessible manner. ‘More or less like Deleuze and Guattari, in their assessment of philosophy, we would like to think about art as something that is at a great distance – maybe even contrary to communication.’ This is no will simple task, as we read in the motto on the cover, ‘Words Don’t Come Easy.’ Nor does De Appel stand alone. On March 1st of last year, the Van Abbe Museum published a catalogue raisonnée by Ian Wilson, one of the most iconic representatives of spoken art. In the decades from 1968 to 2008, he conducted numerous discussions all over Europe and North America, with countless people, sometimes individually, but mostly in groups. They are all described in the book: the locations, the participants, the subject matter and sometimes the reactions. It was a difficult search. Wilson was so engaged with the specific characteristics of speaking, notably its indeterminate and fleeting character, that for all those years he consistently refused to let them be recorded. Wilson’s art is speaking as an objective in itself, as pure speech, without it becoming poetry. In the book, some participants are surprised by the Socratic form of Wilson’s questioning, who during the discussions persisted in undermining every claim to knowledge that is assumed to be present in speech. Remembering this, Rudi Fuchs spoke of a situation of ‘weightlessness’, which he said was achieved because the speaking rested on ‘irresolvable propositions’. Fuchs compared the stillness thus attained in the act of speaking to that of monochrome painting.It is this spirit in search of the purity of the word on Wilson’s part that is now abundantly adrift in the spoken art of today. It is often very direct, as in the Oral Culture performance programme (2008/2009) at the Jan Mot Gallery in Brussels. Responding to my own questions, he replied, ‘Oral culture is a quest that was stimulated by my collaboration with such artists as Ian Wilson and Tino Sehgal.’ Those who spoke this last autumn included Robert Barry, Jonathan Monk, Tris Vonna-Michell, Manon de Boer and Pierre Bismuth. Will Holder recited a lecture by John Cage. Mot continued, ‘What interests me is simply how the spoken word stimulates a different imagination, while at the same time questioning our perception. I am curious about a direct experience, both individually and collectively. I want more insight into how these works can be documented and handed down in time, and in the second instance, in what form they can be sold while respecting the nature and the intentions of the works.’ There is now a brief pause, following a year of these monthly evenings. In any case, the gallery will be presenting a new spoken work by David Lamalas. In May, in London, the name of Will Holder will appear at the ICA event, Talk Show (6-31 May). For the second time, the former designer of METROPOLIS M, with his own self-declared ‘special interest in the oral tradition and the voice as object and medium’, will organize a new gathering to mark Marcel Duchamp’s birthday, this time in association with an exhibition. The production of speech is the objective of the exhibition, which will use the ICA spaces for a month as podia and as production and practice spaces. Together with composers, Alex Waterman’s PlusMinus ensemble will rehearse for evening presentations. Stella Capes will be shooting a film in which 20 opera singers reproduce the screams from a series of 20th-century horror films. An opera by Robert Ashley is also being produced.The voice is the most important vehicle of speech, the ultimate medium. More fleeting than speech itself, it disappears as soon as it has spoken. This makes the voice a complicated subject of our attention, intangible as it is. Nonetheless, it is at the voice where we take pause in this issue, with the question of what it signifies in today’s visual art. It will be spoken of by Mark Beasley, a London curator who has become deeply engaged in the diverse forms in which the voice appears in art and culture; by Adam Pendleton, a New York artist who performs a great deal and became famous last year with his work, Black Dada; and Mladen Dolar, a cultural theorist and psychoanalysis expert, who in several of his books has set out in search of the essence of the voice.
Domeniek Ruyters